Having business ideas is easy. If you are inexperienced, you might jump to implement it and see where that leads you. If you’ve read stuff about startups for a while, you will probably follow the Lean Startup way (and that is very good).

With Competitive Business, I will focus on the growth stage of a startup, to monitor competitors and get key insights on their strategy.

To monitor or not to monitor your competitors?

Some entrepreneurs will monitor their competitors to get inspired or stay up to date with their strategy, and there are that do not (or not so much).

If you don’t pay attention to what’s already out there, you’ll accidentally become a copycat product or start several steps behind everyone else in your space. There’s just too much competition to build blindly. ( Hiten Shah )

For startups that are bootstrapping or get small investments and are not market leaders or want to become unicorns, you need all the resources you can get to make the right decisions on your product. Learn what your customers want (find out from your competitors) and do it right from the first time, else you may run out of money, or even out of enthusiasm to pivot.

Monitoring competitors is good for startups

As the CEO, you will be responsible for creating prices of your product, but if your prices are too over your competitors’ prices, you might fail and don’t know why. Prices are based on what a consumer is willing to pay for the product, but if a consumer has other competitors to choose from, he may choose a lower price product.

A lot of startups will start with lower prices and then grow to prices as they develop the product, as the start is more competitive. I started with the minimum of $5/month plans at Monitor Backlinks and now it’s about $20/month (but the product is much better). Prices change, monitor those changes when your competitors will change the prices. Competitive Business has a website changes feature that will alert you when your competition is making changes to his website most important pages (copywriting, prices, links, award badges, …).

Investing a lot of time into monitoring your competitors is not productive. Having a tool that will do all of this (website changes, trial emails/newsletter, social media, …) and consume about one hour a month, I think it’s worth it, that’s why I am doing this with Competitive Business.

When I first launched my startup Monitor Backlinks, I’ve built it without any PHP framework because I didn’t have a good experience with any that I’ve tried. That was my fault because I didn’t work on very big projects where we could work as a team.

After migrating to Yii2 last year, my development team released today Yii2 for WordPress extension.

Yii2 WordPress is a component for Yii2 framework designed for integration with WordPress CMS via XML-RPC API.

With it, you can easily get new posts from your WordPress blog into your Yii2 application.

Isn’t it annoying always to start a new project and not spend enough time to make it close to perfect? to make it a quality project that you can be proud?

You will be responsible for implementing new features on Monitor Backlinks (https://monitorbacklinks.com). That’s it, no other project, and this for the next few years.

We are not looking for someone great, but for someone Awesome!

General requirements:

– Knowledge at least 1-2 PHP frameworks. We work with Yii2 framework;
– Expert MySQL knowledge. Not just to select data, but to know the difference between heavy and good SQL queries;
– Must be an fluent in OO PHP5;
– Javascript, JQuery, AJAX as a bonus;
– Linux/Unix basic to run command,
– GitHub or other SVN;
– Experience working with 3rd-party web services APIs;

Over the past few months, a subset of free users have engaged in abusive actions that has negatively affected the stability and uptime for all users.

We have taken numerous steps and dedicated resources toward addressing abuse, but have come to the realization that larger changes are needed to bring AppFog back to the level of reliability our customers have every right to expect…

New customers will no longer have the option to sign up for a free plan. We will offer a trial starting very soon.

It’s nice to start by offering free accounts (even if limited), hoping that this will get you more and more users for your product, but look at the downsides.

I hear a lot this advice: “Go freemium, look at what DropBox did and it worked”. I did offer free accounts in the beginning and dropping the free accounts was a good decision for me.

1. Attracting the wrong user

In my startup, over 80% of the resources used by the free users were from Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia) with a conversion rate to paying user close to zero.

If they do decide to pay, they will be a pain and they will have a small lifetime value. A lot of them will ask for discounts and even if you give them, they still might decide not to pay. This will also mess up your projections, thinking that you have many users and that you are growing steady, but after a while seeing a lot of cancellations.

2. Wrong feedback

The free users will not only use your server resources, but also your support time, asking many questions and having all kinds of requests.

Now if you think this is feedback, you are wrong. Don’t look for feedback from the people that won’t pay for your product, because they like to talk, they like to make you work, but in the end they will still not pay and you spend quite a lot of your time working on features that would drive your product in the wrong direction.

Also, you should not give discounts easily. I have a lot of discounts requests, but

3. Undervalue your product

If you start by offering your product for free, they will want to continue to use it for free because “hey, you can afford a small free account just for me”.

Marketing on discount websites is wrong again. I offered the product for almost free (discount + fee = zero revenue) and at the end of their discounted period, 95% cancelled. And just so you know, I had a really low churn-rate with the other users.

When to choose freemium?

There are a lot of cases when freemium work, see Dropbox or Bufferapp. Depending on your product and the resources consumed it can work for you.

You can chose freemium easier if you got a big investment and you are not pressured to go on positive operational profit very fast.

For the last 2 years, I watched how the traffic of my startup grow. After I had managed to get more and more visitors to my website, I started paying more attention to conversions.

The effort to increase my website conversion from 2% to 3% (that’s about 30% increase) is lower than increasing your traffic by 30%, not to mention you improve the quality of your website when you optimize it, you make it clearer to the visitors.

Having good numbers in Google Analytics is not everything though. What good is a visitor that registers, but he doesn’t know that he will eventually have to pay for your product? “On the web you can find everything for free, right?”So I did also a few tests directing my register now button to the Pricing Page. The conversion numbers from visitor to registered user dropped yes, but the conversion from users to premium users grew significantly.

On the free tools page, 80% of the visitors didn’t even think about converting (based on geographical analysis and conversions), but they were using the tools heavily. Keep this in mind when you offer free tools. Even if the tools are free for them, they are not for me: I pay 3rd party services for some data, server power etc.

Focus on getting quality traffic

You may often find that promoting heavily in social media or posting everywhere can get your website bounce rate really high (high = bad), so measuring channels just on visits or conversion rate is not really enough.

Look at the effort spent on each channel. From some channel it’s easier to get 1000 people to visit your website, but only 5 to register and from some another channel you may work the same to get 100 people to visit your websit,e but 20 to register.Where should you focus your marketing efforts?

Once I’ve hit my product market fit, I started going where my targeted user were. This showed in a decrease in traffic, but a lot higher quality visitors (bounce rate improved by 20% and average visit duration by 40%).

You feel like you have the potential to do greatness if given the chance? 🙂

This is a letter to you, our next collaborator.

Are you specialized in one of these fields: IT(PHP, MySQL, Java Script, HTML, CSS), SEO/Adwords, Marketing, Public relation, Web Design, Copy-writing and looking for new opportunities?

We give you the chance to show: Initiative and Skill and earn a fair amount of money for useful proposals of improvement for monitorbacklinks.com.

We are rewarding any suggestion you might have, and we’ll pay you to implement it, for:

developing new useful features of the product;

successfully promoting/selling it to different target audiences;

developing and implementing communication campaigns;

improving user’s experience by making the design more user friendly, or by communicating etter the qualities of our product.

If you feel, just by looking at monitorbacklinks.com, that we need you to make it better, you might be right, so…contact us. J Find from the above list what you could excel in, and join our team of employees or collaborators.

Be sure you do your research thoroughly, get to know our product first, understand what it stands for, ask us if there is something you need to clarify, and only then come to us with your ideas.

If you are tired of working on an agency or as a freelancer and doing tens or hundreds of websites, not focusing on quality because of projects budgets and because you have to move to on to the next project, I invite you to come work on Monitor Backlinks!

Monitor Backlinks is an SEO tool for SEO developers. It helps them monitor their link building efforts and keep the user focused on building more links, without having to worry if their links get removed or broken. It also helps them organize the backlinks better and see what are the most important backlinks.